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Television and taste hierarchy:

The case of Dutch television comedy

When applied to television, the classical distinction between highbrow and lowbrow culture does not

seem to make much sense. Such hierarchical ranking of taste, drawing a clear boundary between

difficult and sophisticated highbrow taste and accessible, entertaining popular taste, seems to lose

much of its validity when confronted with television’s fragmented and eclectic mixture of information

and entertainment; art, play and commerce. In fact, most of television’s fare consists of what is

generally subsumed under the heading of popular or lowbrow culture: the large majority of television

programming consists of popular entertainment genres such as comedy, soap, popular drama, pop

music, or sports.

There is a tendency, both in common sense and in academic thought, to simply write off the

whole medium as lowbrow and popular (Seiter 1999, esp. 1-6). A very striking example, both of the

low status of TV, and the (academic) prejudice against the medium, can be found in Pierre Bourdieu’s

Distinction (1984). Distinction, probably the most influential work on hierarchies of taste, describes

taste differences between upper, middle and working classes in France. In what is probably the central

figure of the book, showing the relationship between taste, economic capital (money) and cultural

capital (education), newspapers, music and movie actors are mentioned individually, and occupy very

different positions (Bourdieu 1984: 128-129). However, there are no television programs in this figure.

Instead, only the medium itself is in the figure, and it is somewhere down in the middle, close to

potatoes, sports fishing, ordinary red wine, foremen, and an income of 21,000 franks, which is well

below average. TV is actually below most popular entertainments, such as funfairs, adventure stories,

and love stories.

Due to the medium’s low status, and its incompatibility with clearly demarcated taste

hierarchies, television programs seem to elude hierarchical ranking (Davies e.a. 2000). However, it is

definitely possible to rank television audiences hierarchically, as audiences tend to ‘organize’

themselves according to social status (Livingstone, 1993; Seiter, 1999; Webster e.a., 2000). People of

higher and lower SES, educational levels, status groups, income groups, or any of the other names

used to describe class differences, watch different channels, different programs, and different genres.

Such ‘taste cultures’ (Gans, 1999) are something both advertisers, scholars, and audiences

themselves are well aware of. However, there has been considerable debate and disagreement about

the nature of these taste cultures: are they ‘different tastes’ of equal value and worth, or are they

different in a more fundamental way? Disagreements about the nature of taste cultures are often linked

with the conceptualization of the relationship between these cultures, and the link between taste

cultures and social groups and categories. The implications of such conceptualizations are far-

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reaching, as each of these leads into a different notion not only of what people are doing when they are

watching TV, but lead directly into question about the value and worth of the medium, as well as its

programs. Moreover, television, more than any other medium, raises the question of the mechanisms

behind taste cultures and hierarchies. How are audiences perpetuated, with the same programs entering

into everybody’s living room?

This paper explores these television taste cultures and hierarchies, and the mechanisms

underlying and perpetuating them. It will focus on one specific form of popular television: television

comedy in the Netherlands. Comedy as a genre is very varied, but is never truly highbrow. In this

respect, like television, it eludes classical highbrow-lowbrow distinctions. The paper will draw on a

combination of survey and interview data, collected as part of a larger study of social differences in

sense of humor in the Netherlands (Kuipers 2001). Using a combination of survey data and interview

materials, this article will look at Dutch taste cultures in television comedy, and the relationship

between these taste cultures. The survey data will be used to the patterns of liking, dislike, and

knowledge of Dutch television comedy, and their relationship to educational level. The interview

materials will be used to interpret the survey data and to understand the mechanisms behind taste

cultures and taste hierarchies in television comedy: how do they work? How are they perpetuated?

And especially, how are they perpetuated with as fragmented and anti-hierarchical a medium as

television?

Taste, it will be argued, has to be understood not only as a pattern of preferences and aversion,

but as a form of cultural knowledge. This cultural knowledge is crucial in the development and

perpetuation of taste hierarchies. Knowledge always precedes both appreciation and dislike: you have

to be aware of something in order to like something, hate it, or be indifferent to it. But taste also

requires the knowledge to interpret television shows, to recognize genres, to discuss television with

others, and to make meaningful taste judgments. To enjoy television comedy, quite some knowledge is

needed; and as I hope to show here: the nature, as well as the amount, of such cultural knowledge

varies between social groups.

Taste cultures and taste hierarchies

Not all audiences are taste cultures, and not all taste cultures are hierarchically related. Only certain

audiences are stable and comprehensive enough to be dubbed a taste culture: an audience can be a one-

time alliance. Also, a very specific audience for only one kind of show – the people who always watch

the eight o’clock news – probably does not comprise not a taste culture. A taste culture is a group of

people with a shared system of preferences and dislikes, with its own ‘logic’, or criteria for good and

bad quality or taste (Radway 1984; Kuipers 2001). These taste cultures are often (but not always)

related to social background variables; and the status of this social category can (but does not have to)

affect the status of the taste itself.

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In general, taste cultures have been described in two, complementary, ways. First of all, taste

can be interpreted as a preference for a group of cultural objects such as books, clothes, or television

programs. Taste is then a ‘style’ that can be clearly demarcated, and captured in rather descriptive

terms. Taste in this meaning, can be highly visible: by wearing, reading, using, and in other ways

proclaiming one’s preference for these objects, people show their taste. However, taste cultures do not

have to correspond to such a visible preference: the same object can be appreciated for different

reasons within different taste cultures (Fiske, 1989; Hall 1980). Thus, taste is also a way of looking, a

system of preferences and criteria that is mainly in people’s heads (and bodies), or a habitus, as

Bourdieu (1984) has called it.

Taste cultures are best understood when contrasted with other taste cultures: they entail

preferences as well as aversion, criteria for good and for bad taste. The relationship between taste

cultures can have many forms, ranging from opposition to peaceful coexistence to complete ignorance.

Not only is there considerable variety in possible relationships between taste cultures; scholars have

conceptualized such relationships in many different ways. To clarify the relationship between taste

culture, taste hierarchy, and social status, I will give a short overview of possible relationships

between taste cultures, and link these ‘models’ of these relationships to some theoretical

conceptualizations of these relationships. This is intended as a conceptual exercise, not an extended

literature review of the theories about taste cultures and television audiences (for an overview and

discussion, see for instance Livingstone 1998).

The relationship between taste cultures depends first of all on the awareness of taste cultures

of each other. Such awareness depends on contact between taste cultures through interaction (within

homes, institutions, geographical regions), as well as contact through mass media. Usually, taste

cultures within one society are very much aware of each other. Many tastes and styles are defined in

opposition to others: youth cultures are shaped in opposition to adult culture (Hebdige 1979; Willis

1977; 1990); avant-garde culture is a rejection of bourgeois or conservative highbrow culture (Crane

1987). Even status-based cultures usually have some element of opposition: working class culture is

partly shaped in opposition to middle class culture (Willis 1977), but the opposite is true as well:

middle class culture is also an attempt to distinguish themselves from working class culture (Bourdieu

1984). This oppositional model conceptualizes taste cultures as resistance, rejection, inversion,

distinction, in short, attempts to not be something; it is probably the most prevalent in the literature on

taste.

Whereas the oppositional model presupposes conflict (at least conflict of interest), the

‘lifestyle model’ describes a relation between taste cultures that do not compete, nor look down upon

each other, but simple exist side by side. This is basically the traditional model of cultural difference

between ethnic groups or nation states as self-contained cultures. Subcultures organized around

musical styles may be understood from such a lifestyle perspective. Theoretical models assuming such

a relationship between taste cultures tend to prevail in applied audience studies, such as advertising or

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ratings analysis (Spangenberg, F & L. Liebregts, 2002; Webster e.a. 2000), but also in some

postmodernist perspectives celebrating ‘lifestyle’ as free choice, a coincidence of little consequence,

or a charming source of variety (Featherstone, 1991). A cultural model of this kind is often used

explicitly to counter interpretations in terms of domination and resistance: and unusual but very

forceful example is the concept of ‘gender culture’ introduced by sociolinguist Tannen (1994).

Yet another model of the relation between taste cultures is the mainstream versus

marginal/subculture. Here, the taste cultures differ in size or social importance, without necessary

implying status differences. Dominant taste cultures always coexist with smaller taste cultures. The

relationship between mainstream and subcultures can vary widely. For one thing, they may be more or

less compatible. Oppositional subcultures are intentionally incompatible, but in the taste cultures of

strict religious minorities the incompatibility may be more unintentional. Other marginal taste cultures

are very compatible with mainstream culture; an example would be children’s culture (Davies e.a.

2000). In such cases, a smaller taste culture can easily be interpreted as a variety within a larger taste

culture. Also, the status of the marginal taste culture may vary. There are marginal taste groups with a

low status, subcultures of approximately the same status as the mainstream, but ‘exclusive’ tastes can

be marginal to the mainstream while still being very prestigious. This mainstream-subculture model

does not correspond very clearly with a theoretical model or perspective. Some scholars have focused

on oppositional subcultures, interpreting the mainstream-subculture model in terms of opposition (see

above). Many have taken a more ethnographic point of view, trying to link a specific subculture to the

life experience of a specific social group (Ang 1985). And obviously, many studies of ‘a television

tradition’ or ‘a people’ often focus, more or less consciously, on the mainstream.

A fairly recent model is the ‘fragmentation’ model: many different taste cultures, without one

clear mainstream. This is basically a variation on the lifestyle model, but it is often used in opposition

to the mainstream model, in the sense that this is what happens when the mainstream disappears: many

different taste groups, that are not fixed but rather based on fleeting alliances; none larger or more

powerful than the other. This model seems to work best to describe television taste cultures, especially

in 50+ channel countries such as the US (Ang, 1991; Heeter & Greenberg, 1988; Webster & Phalen,

1997). In fact, with its stress on the fluidity of taste cultures, this model is almost a description of the

end of taste culture.

All the above models describe relationships between taste cultures that are not inherently

hierarchical. Very often, however, relationships between taste cultures become entangled with

difference in status or power. In this case: taste cultures get a different status, and the relationship

between taste cultures becomes a highbrow-lowbrow model. High status taste culture is not only a

taste liked by people with more social status; this status difference is demarcated in the tastes

themselves. Highbrow taste is usually less accessible, more difficult, more expensive, or all of these,

than lowbrow or ‘normal’ tastes. Thus: highbrow taste is exclusive. Also, high status tastes usually

become what Bourdieu (1984) has called the ‘legitimate taste’, a standard for good taste and quality,

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and as such will be presented in museums, taught in schools, or subsidized by governments. A true

hierarchical relationship implies the people at the bottom accept, in one way or another, the legitimacy

of this taste. Most theories presuppose that people at the top of the social ladder look down upon

lowbrow taste, but this is not necessary. Recently, some theorists have described the possibility that

high status groups become omnivores: high status groups may have wider tastes, including both

exclusive tastes and (parts of) less exclusive lowbrow taste. This model was based on a study of music

lovers, where higher educated people would like both pop music and classical music; whereas lower

status groups only appreciated pop music (Peterson & Simkus 1992), but Davies e.a. (2000) have

described the relationship between children’s television taste culture and adult culture in similar terms.

The highbrow-lowbrow differences are not necessarily related to size of a group, but the

groups need to be aware of each other, and there usually is quite some deliberate incompatibility in

highbrow and lowbrow taste cultures. For this reason, the highbrow/lowbrow model is often very close

to the oppositional model. Highbrow tastes are also a negation of lowbrow tastes, or an attempt at

‘distinction’ as Bourdieu has called it, whereas lowbrow tastes tend to be rebellious about highbrow

humor, as has been described most convincingly by Paul Willis (1977).

The highbrow-lowbrow model is where most of the theorizing has been done. Lowbrow

culture has been interpreted in many conflicting ways, from resistance within hegemonic culture to the

expression of ‘false consciousness’, from authentic self-expression to a creative and confident dealing

with modern mass culture. High culture has been understood as expression of exclusion and

dominance, as attempts to distinguish oneself from others, but also as the expression of true beauty,

and strained and forced pretense (Kuipers 2001). However, as social mobility has increased

significantly, and boundaries and genres are becoming increasingly blurred and fluid, scholars as well

as laymen increasingly doubt the existence and viability of rigid taste hierarchies. Scholarly

denouncement of this model is not only empirical, but also ideological: in most work on television,

scholars have come to the defense of lowbrow cultures, trying to show the creativity and legitimacy in

lowbrow culture, and the power, resistance, and agency of low status ‘audiences’ (Livingstone 1998).

However, this ‘celebration of forms of capital involved in the appreciation of television programs’

(Seiter 1999, p.26) has led media/audience studies to downplay the possibility of hierarchical

relationships between taste cultures.

Taste cultures and social background: the case of Dutch television comedy

For a study of social differences in sense of humor, a survey was done among a random sample of 340

Dutch. In this survey, people were asked to rate 35 jokes, along with a number of humorous television

shows (talk shows, sitcoms, variety shows, satire, etc) and comedians and other people who were

publicly known for their humorous performances (talk show hosts, a writer, some presenters, etc). 66

people were interviewed about their uses and preferences for humor. Of these 66, 32 were people who

had also filled out the questionnaire: these were sampled by age, gender, and education. The other 34

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interviews are less relevant to this article, although they will be cited as well: they were ‘joke-tellers’,

people who know and tell a lot of jokes. These people were approached in different ways: some

reacted to advertisements, some were recruited through snowball sampling, but most were approached

during the selection of a television joke contest. All these joke-tellers had a working class or lower

middle class background; which is related to the fact that joke-telling, in the Netherlands, is

considered a form of lowbrow humor.

The survey ratings were analyzed to look for ‘clusters’ that could be interpreted as ‘humor

tastes’ or ‘humor styles’. A combination of factor analysis (principal component analysis) and

PRINCALS (non-linear principal component analysis) of these data resulted in four clusters of items

loading .35 on one of the factors; one fairly small one, consisting of only three very famous

comedians, and three larger clusters. Cronbach’s α for each of these clusters can be found in figure 1.

This combination of techniques was necessary to deal with the structure of these data: there were

systematic differences not only in appreciation of the items (5-point Likert scales), but also in the

knowledge of the items. As will become clear later, this was a methodological hindrance, but

theoretically a very relevant finding.1

As the names of Dutch comedians and television shows in these humor styles probably do not

mean much to an international audience, and I am not interested here in the nature of these styles, but

rather in the relationship between them, I will only briefly describe the four clusters. The first cluster

consists of a number of older comedians and two writers. They have been popular for at least thirty or

forty years, and are mainly liked by older people. Most of them are very old themselves, and several

are dead already. These I have called the ‘oldtimers’. The second cluster, which I have called the

‘celebrities’, consists of only three very famous comedians. One of them had a late night show at the

time of the research, the others had both done the very prestigious New Years’ Eve television comedy

show several times and toured the country with successful shows. The third cluster I have dubbed

‘lowbrow comedy’: it consists of four comedians (all working mainly for TV), a TV joke contest

presenter, a professional joke-teller, as well as three sitcoms, a game show, a candid camera program

and a variety sketch program. The fourth cluster I have called ‘highbrow comedy’. This cluster

consists of three satirical TV shows, a humorous talk show, as well as the internationally well-known

Monty Python and Absolutely Fabulous. The people in this cluster are somewhat harder to classify:

one writer of children’s books as well as musicals and a number of hugely popular TV series, two

poets/comedians who had, at some time, television shows, two artist/comedian/actor/TV-producers; as

well as two ‘regular’ comedians, and one ‘real’ writer who definitely is not a television comedian.

Not all items were part of any of these tastes; 11 of the 45 items in the questionnaire did not fit

into any of these categories. It is interesting to note that, apart from the two British contributions to the

highbrow style, none of the foreign shows and comedians in the questionnaire, ranging from Friends

and Laurel and Hardy to ’Allo ’Allo and David Letterman, were related to any of these clusters. This

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does not mean they were not liked. Some, like Friends, Mr. Bean, or Married with children, were

actually rated quite high.

The next step of the analysis was to look at the relationship between these humor styles and

social background. Scales were constructed to measure the appreciation and the knowledge of the

clusters. Knowledge was the proportion of items from the cluster that was known to a respondent, on a

scale from 0 (none) to 1 (all). In the highbrow cluster, there was considerably more variety in this than

in any of the other clusters. Appreciation is the mean appreciation for all the items in one cluster that a

respondent had rated. As not all respondents knew all the items (as a matter of fact, only 6 of the 340

respondents rated all items), the appreciation scores are not all based on the same or the same number

of ratings. However, an appreciation score based on only one rating never occurred. In figure 1, the

relation between these between knowledge and appreciation of these clusters and social background

variables is shown.

Figure 1: Humor styles: the relation between appreciation, knowledge, and social background

CLUSTER

Mean

Standaard Deviation

Correlation with education

Correlation with age

Gender difference

Cronbach’s α

OLD-TIMERS Appreciation Knowledge

3.27I .94 II

.73 I .15 II

-.04 .08

.47 .37

n.s. n.s.

.81

CELEBRITIES Appreciation Knowledge

3.66I .99 II

.93 I .00 II

.02 .07

-.37 .00

m > f n.s.

.63

LOWBROW Appreciation Knowledge

2.90I .87 II

.75 I .14 II

-.27 -.19

.24 -.24

n.s. n.s.

.87

HIGHBROW Appreciation Knowledge

3.20I .66 II

.70 I .23 II

.18 .35

-.13 -.11

n.s. n.s.

.76 III

Bold: p < 0,01 I On a five point scale II On a scale from 0 (knows none) to 1 (knows all). III In the highbrow cluster, Cronbach’s α was computed using the best known 10 out of 14 items; because of the amount of ‘unknowns’. However, whereas adding or removing items leads to a large variation in the number of respondents used to compute α, it hardly causes any variety in the value of α itself; this remained always above 0.70.

1 For a more elaborate discussion of the statistics involved in this analysis, see author 1999.

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Figure 1 shows the relationship between these clusters and both age and educational level. The

appreciation of the old-timer and celebrity clusters was related to age; the old-timer clusters has a

rather strong positive correlation (r = .47, p<.01) with age; the celebrity cluster a fairly strong negative

(r = -.37, p<.01) correlation. Moreover, this cluster is the only one that is related to gender: men liked

it significantly more than women. The appreciation of the lowbrow cluster correlated positively with

age (r = .24); negatively with education (r = -.27, p<.01). The highbrow cluster, finally, shows a weak

correlation between appreciation and educational level (r = .18, p<.01). In this cluster social

background is not so much related to preference, but more to knowledge of these people and shows.

The percentage of comedians and shows the subjects claimed to know, irrespective of appreciation,

correlates .35 (p<.01) with education. In other words: many lower educated people do not even know

the programs and people in this cluster, and consequently do not have any opinion.

This relation was also found for individual items in the highbrow cluster: appreciation of the

comedians/television shows in this taste usually didn’t correlate significantly, or only very weakly,

with educational level. But apart from the very famous Freek de Jonge (whom everybody knew) and

the almost completely unknown one-season De Hunkering, respondents who knew an item were

always significantly higher educated that respondents who did not know them. As can also be seen in

figure one, a similar pattern was found in the old-timer clusters; where age is correlated significantly

with knowledge. This was less unexpected, as many of the people in this cluster had not been on

television for some time, and younger people simply might not have seen them.

This survey of Dutch humor and comedy showed rather more simple, straightforward, and

deterministic taste cultures than I expected, having read the literature on the increasing fragmentation

and democratization of taste. Rather than a wide variety of lifestyles, eclectic omnivores, or

fragmented taste cultures, the analysis resulted in a simple two-dimensional solution, with taste

differences explained mainly by age and education, hardly by gender, and not at all by more

ephemeral postmodern lifestyle variables.

To what extent do these clusters resemble the models described above? The age differences in

comedy taste are symmetrical: young people dislike old people’s humor, and old people dislike young

people’s humor. This pattern of mutual dislike can be easily explained by changes over time: there

have been a number of significant changes in Dutch humor in the past fifty years, and older people

were socialized in a different form of humor. This still shows in their preferences: older people

generally find ‘today’s humor’, as they called it during interviews, both too fast and too explicit. The

objections of younger, as well as most middle age people, mirror this: they usually said older comedy

slow, old-fashioned, and not very challenging. This seems to imply that there are no clear status

differences between these taste groups; they both equally dislike the other groups’ comedy.

The differences in knowledge can be explained by the time factor as well: many of the

comedians in the old-timer group have not been on television for many years and younger people

simply will have missed them. This pattern then comes close to the different-but-equal lifestyle model,

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but for one thing: what is favored by younger people is at the same time the mainstream: the comedy

preferred by younger people (or avoided by older ones) is the small group of extremely popular

comedians. These are very well-known, and quite widely liked. Because of this, the difference

between the age groups looks more like a mainstream-versus-subculture model, with, interestingly, the

older people the subculture. Usually, young people are described from the perspective of subcultures

The difference between highbrow and lowbrow comedy looks, as the name suggests, more like

a hierarchical ordering of taste. For one thing, it obviously is related to social status. Also, the nature

of the two styles resembles in many ways the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow tastes:

understated, ambivalent, slightly avant-garde versus exuberant and explicitly humorous. But the

strongest indication here is the asymmetry: higher educated people disapprove of lowbrow comedy,

while lower educated people don’t even know highbrow comedy, and thus, do not even get the chance

to disapprove of it (or like it). Such a pattern of disapproval of other’s people tastes, lives, ideas, etc.,

while keeping those of oneself inaccessible, is typical of elite tastes. What this pattern shows is that

highbrow comedy is exclusive in the literal sense of the word: it excludes people. Apparently, despite

its accessibility, television can be very exclusive. However, what this pattern cannot show is the other

aspect of hierarchy: do lower status groups accept the legitimacy of highbrow humor?

Knowledge and taste hierarchy

Both the age and the educational differences illustrate something that is often overlooked in studies of

television audiences: you have to know something to appreciate it. Appreciation, but also dislike,

presupposes awareness. As Webster e.a. write:

‘Much theorizing about the audience presupposes perfect awareness on the part of audience members. In other words, media selections are assumed to occur with a full knowledge of the content options. (…) If, as is sometimes the case, people select programming without a full understanding of their options, the interpretation of program choice as an expression of preferences is oversimplified if not evaluated along with other factors.’ (Webster e.a. 2000, p. 172-173)

In fact, such perfect awareness is not lacking ‘sometimes’ as Webster e.a. assume: it is very rare. In

this study, only 6 respondents, or 1.8%, knew all the items, although, admittedly, the items were

selected for maximum variety, and some of these people and shows had not been on TV for quite

some time. The percentage of people who knew an item ranged from 99.7% (for Paul de Leeuw, one

of the celebrities, with a daily late night show) to 36.4% (for Hans Teeuwen a relatively new and

somewhat avant-garde comedian), with an average percentage of 72.9% of the respondents claiming to

know a comedian or TV program.

What these data show is that the knowledge of television fare, or the awareness, as Webster

e.a. call it, is divided very unequally across the population. On the whole, higher educated respondents

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know more television comedians and television shows: educational level is weakly but significantly

correlated (r=.17, p < .01) to knowledge of all items (including the ones not in clusters) in the

questionnaire. Thus, higher educated have not only more knowledge of their own taste culture, they

have more knowledge in general. Although there was no support for the omnivore model in the sense

that higher educated people would have a wider taste, apparently they do have a wider knowledge.

The knowledge of older comedians was not related to knowledge in general, as it was in the

case of education. On the contrary, there was significant inverse correlation between age and

knowledge of all items (r = .31, p<.01). Thus, higher educated people truly have more knowledge of

television comedy, whereas older people simply have more specific knowledge. This supports the

notion that the taste cultures related to age differ from the taste cultures related to educational level.

Knowledge can work in many different ways here: the knowledge of older people proved them experts

in a marginal taste; whereas the lack of knowledge of lower educated showed them to be excluded

from highbrow culture. This shows how central cultural knowledge is to the understanding of the

relationships between taste cultures: the patterns in knowledge and unfamiliarity that the nature of the

relationship between these taste cultures can be established.

Thus, taste is comprised of three things: it is not only liking and dislike, there is a third factor

involved: knowledge. This knowledge is mediated by social background. In the case of age difference,

this is understandable, but in the case of highbrow and lowbrow television, this is less easy to explain.

This process of getting knowledge then seems to be at the heart of the exclusion process that is central

to taste hierarchy.

To understand the relationship between knowledge and appreciation, another PRINCALS-

analysis was done, looking at the relationship between liking, dislike, and knowledge of elite comedy.

For this, the variables were recoded into a nominal variable with 3 values: liking (4 and 5 on a five

point scale); dislike/neutral (1,2,3 on a 5 point scale); and no knowledge. This was related to

educational level, and the result of this analysis is shown in figure 2. In this figure, which may be a

little hard to read, most (not all) of highbrow comedians are shown three times: once the score for

positive evaluation, once the score for negative or neutral evaluation, and once the score for their

unknown-ness. It is shown how these three are related to educational level.

This figure shows clearly how awareness of highbrow comedy works: both the probability for

positive and negative/neutral ratings increase with higher educational levels. One could say that

educational level is a condition to get to know elitist humor; only from this point, people can decide

whether they like it or not. This is related to an increase in cultural knowledge which apparently comes

with education. A comparable analysis was run for lowbrow humor (not shown here); this showed a

more direct relationship between education, and appreciation and dislike.

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Figure 2: appreciation and knowledge of highbrow humor(PRINCALS-analysis)

CAPITALS: liking (4 or 5 on five point scale) Italics: dislike: 1,2, or 3 on a five point scale Regular: do not know LO: primary education LBO: lower vocational education MBO: secondary vocational education MO: general (i.e. non-vocational) secondary education (higher level than vocational) HBO: higher professional education (college-level; comparable to British polytechnic) WO: university (literally: scientific education)

WOHBOMO LBO Teeuwen

MBOHaenenLO

SCHIPPERS

DeJonge

DEJONGEKOOT&BIE

De Jonge

EDERVEENTEEUWEN

Ederveen Teeuwen

DORRESTIJN

DorrestijnSchippers

Koot & Bie

Koot & Bie

Jiskefet Ederveen SchippersDorrestijn

JISKEFET

Jiskefet

Hunkering

HUNKERING

Hunkering

HAENEN

Haenen

Figure 2 provides a clear example of an exclusive taste culture. It illustrate the inaccessibility of

highbrow comedy; and it illustrates the fact that a specific kind of knowledge is needed to appreciate

this comedy, but also to get any ‘reading’ of this comedy: you also need education to dislike highbrow

comey. What kind of knowledge is this? How does this work? The survey data show the patterns, and

the structure, but they are not very helpful to unearth the mechanisms behind this; for this, I will now

turn to the interviews.

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‘Doesn’t do anything for me’: lower educated interviewees and the inaccessibility of highbrow

comedy

The understanding of taste hierarchies lies then, like with so many social inequalities, in the unequal

division of knowledge. Who is it harder for lower educated people to get to know highbrow humor?

Given the nature of television, everything should be knowable. And this applies even more to the

Netherlands, where there were, at the time of the research only eight channels (and a handful British,

Belgian and German that most people don’t watch). This question why people do not know things is

rather hard to ask, and even harder to answer, but luckily, it came up many times during my interviews

with both the 34 joke-tellers and the 32 interviewees from the sample, 16 of whom were lower

educated and 15 of whom could be said to be part of the lowbrow taste culture, one of which was an

M.D. – which immediately shows that taste cultures are related to, but not dictated by, social

background variables.

The lack of knowledge of interviewees with a lowbrow taste is probably illustrated best by the

example of Arjen Ederveen. Shortly before and during my interviews, this actor/comedian/television

maker had caused quite a stir in ‘my circles’ with a series of programs called Thirty minutes, aired by

intellectual and slightly elitist broadcasting corporation VPRO from 1997-1999. Thirty minutes

received a lot of attention and rave reviews in the quality press, and was discussed widely among the

people I know. It was a series of slow, extremely conscientiously performed fake documentaries (or

‘mockumentaries’). The most famous probably is the episode called ‘born into the wrong body’, about

a farmer from the rural northern province of Groningen who undergoes a series of race-change

operations; he is made over into a negro. The show could hardly be called a parody: the tone and

atmosphere of serious documentary about a taxing psychological process was maintained so

consistently, that it was hard to tell whether it was in humor or in earnest. Most higher educated

interviewees called it ‘unbelievably good’, ‘very very funny’, also ‘very recognizable’, and, in the

jargon of high culture, Ederveen was described as ‘a real artist’.

The questionnaire showed him to be known by only 51% of the respondents. Most lower

educated informants from the sample, as well as the joke-tellers (who were all lower educated) had

never heard of him, even after I gave a number of examples or described several of the things

Ederveen had done, including older shows, in some detail. Those who did know him were completely

uninterested. I will cite some of those more informed reactions:

Do you know Thirty minutes? Husband: This VPRO-show. Well, I must admit in all honesty, When I saw that, with this weatherman I think it was, then I thought, this must be a documentary or something. Wife: It seems very serious. Husband: And then later, I was speaking to my daughter on the phone, and she says, man, you should watch that. I said: you mean that was humor? Didn’t look like humor to me. (husband is a longshoreman; wife is a seamstress; both lower educated)

13

Do you know Thirty Minutes? ‘Thirty minutes. Well, I don’t think I have ever really seen it. Well, once, some time ago. But after that, I never really watched. I don’t really know it, really. It doesn’t do much for me.’ (male, technician, lower educated)

As is clear from these quotes, there were no clear objections to this shows, it was rather a matter of

incomprehension and disinterest. People ‘did not see the humor’; and they didn’t see anything else in

there. Many other comedians and shows in this cluster were commented on in a fairly similar tone. As

one man said about comedian/poet/ presenter Dorrestijn: ‘It doesn’t have any meaning for me. He’s

there on TV, warbling away, and I say to that: it’s all fine with me but it is clearly not my thing. And

it’s nothing personal about this character, because I couldn’t care less, but is doesn’t do anything for

me. I’ve got no feelers for it, I guess.’(higher educated: doctor with distinct lowbrow taste)

This very much sums up the mechanism behind this lack of knowledge: people have no feelers

for it. A show or a comedian simply does not amuse a person: it doesn’t touch them, it doesn’t move

them; but it doesn’t infuriate, insult, or even annoy them either. There is simple no substantial

argument against it. After a first chance encounter on TV, it was dismissed, and often forgotten -- in

many cases, people only remembered seeing something or someone after some probing. Also, it is

very likely that the repeated probing might have resulted in people claiming to like it, because I asked

them, and they did not want to seem stupid or uncultured. There is a strong performative aspect to

taste as well; I will come back to this later. At any rate: it is clear that highbrow humor simple doesn’t

‘do’ much for most lower educated people: neither the humor, nor the person, the story, the theme and

the style.

The more famous comedians and shows from the highbrow style were known to most of the

interviewees, but they were usually dismissed in a similar way: not on the basis of concrete objections,

but because it didn’t mean anything to them. The tone in these answers often was rather despondent.

As one lower educated housewife said about satirist Van Kooten and De Bie: ‘I am not sure, maybe I

just don’t like their faces.’ Or, even more doubtful: ‘Van Kooten en de Bie. Yes. No. Whether it was

to highbrow for me, I don’t know. Of maybe they were too harsh or something. I couldn’t appreciate

them.’ (man, technician) What is striking here is the lack of arguments to sustain their opinion, and

even their lack or words.

What happens there can be interpreted easily in terms of the encoding/decoding model of Hall

(1980; see also Van Zoonen 1994), but this model seems to suggest that different readings may be

what the author had intended, but that there is some pleasure in these readings, and some creativity in

the interpretation. However, these people lack the knowledge to understand these forms of comedy in

a way that gratifies them. They don’t see something different, or have a different reading: many of my

informants saw Ederveen, or Dorrestijn, or Van Kooten and De Bie, and saw nothing. Morley (1980),

in an extension of the encoding/decoding model, described a form of reading he called ‘rejection’

which is closer to what is happening here, but even that does not quite capture the sense of ‘failed

14

reading’ or ‘despondent’ reading. This is, as Livingstone has called it, more like a ‘battle between the

hegemonic positioning of the text and the nonresponsiveness of the viewer’ (Livingstone 1998, p. 203)

And even when people with this taste do see ‘something’ in highbrow comedy, I am not sure

whether it makes sense to look at this in terms of ‘another reading’. One retired traveling salesman

described a parody of satirists Van Kooten & De Bie, in which they impersonate two posh middle ages

sisters, pearl necklace, tweed skirt, burgundy turtleneck, affected speech and all. Maybe it is important

to add that the creators have often been noted for their empathic and life-like characters. The salesman

commented:

‘When they are both dressed up as women, well, it might be funny to someone else, but it doesn’t do much for me. It just comes across a bit peculiar. But anyone else might crack up over it, haha [fake laughter] very funny.’

This man saw a really cheap gag, an old variety show sketch: a man in women’s clothes He has a

different reading from what I am quite sure is the ‘preferred’ reading, but he doesn’t seem to get much

satisfaction in any form from his own, ‘puzzled’ reading. What happens here seems to correspond

closer with the more absolutist models of Pierre Bourdieu, who suggest that a specific cultural

‘habitus’ is needed to enjoy highbrow cultures, than with the more open encoding/decoding model. I

think it makes more sense to describe this as misinterpretation, as a failure to ‘get the joke’, than to

describe this as an interpretive act with some kind of gratification. This seems to miss the point, which

is that this is a form of exclusion.

This is the mechanism supporting taste hierarchies in television: people look at the same thing,

to which they have completely equal access, but they see something very different. Or in most cases:

they actually see nothing. There is something in highbrow comedy that makes many people, not only

lower educated people, but also a significant fraction of the higher educated, to lose interest. This is

not because this humor contains references that people might miss, as I might when trying to

understand American humor. The inaccessibility of this humor is mainly a matter of style: there is

nothing about the subject matter that people disagree with, there usually are no words or references for

which they lack the knowledge, it simple is the fact that it has no meaning to hem. This lack of interest

is an immediate reaction as fast and automatic as laughter or indignation. It is indeed, as my

interviewee said, a matter of ‘feelers’ somebody might or might not have. Bourdieu might call these

‘feelers’ part of someone’s habitus: a form of practical knowledge, consisting of embodied, automatic

ways of seeing, feeling, behaving and interpreting, which is related to one’s social position.

So what is it about highbrow comedy that excludes people? What does the cultural knowledge

to understand and appreciated this comedy consist of? In many ways, highbrow comedy is more

difficult than lowbrow comedy. This difficulty lies in the higher speed, in the references and allusions,

and in the ambivalence of the humor. Highbrow comedy appeals to a number of different emotions at

the same time, both pleasant and unpleasant. Furthermore, it is often not very clearly framed as

15

humorous; as in the description of Ederveen, people may not be sure whether this absurdity is truly

funny. The overall effect is a form of humor that is not always recognizable as such, and that is

bordering on the absurd or the disagreeable. This means that the appreciation of this highbrow humor

requires a certain distance that is comparable to Bourdieu’s esthetic disposition: the esthetic attitude

that one needs for the appreciation of modern and abstract art. This disposition implies a distant,

somewhat cerebral perspective on beauty and enjoyment: not the accessible pleasure of something that

is attractive, pretty or nice at first sight, but a more distanced enjoyment of the things that have to

‘grow on you’. Much of literature, modern art, of contemporary music (both classical and jazz, less

pop or rock) is not attractive when you first come across it. A comparable thing goes for this Dutch

highbrow comedy: it is not funny or nice at first sight, and it might even by outright unpleasant.

Knowledge is required to see the ‘fun’ in this.

In practice, such a habitus is clearly exclusive, but does this mean it is snobbery? For those

who have internalized this, the appreciation of this humor is completely automatic. Laughter about this

Ederveen is as direct and reflexive as laughter at a joke, or the disinterest of the joke-tellers.

Aficionados of highbrow comedy have different ideas of what good and bad humor is; and for this

reason, the see something in this humor what others will not see. However, there is clearly an element

of opposition to this taste culture: it is never easy-going or just for fun, it is never ‘just a joke’, it is

always intended to stimulate, to irritate, to educate, to satirize, as well as to amuse. Thus, it is an

oppositional taste culture: it is self-consciously trying not to be ‘just amusement’.

The power to judge and the performance of taste: higher educated interviewees and the dislike

of lowbrow comedy

While highbrow television comedy is mostly unknown to lower educated people (or people with

lowbrow humor), higher educated respondents do have knowledge of lowbrow comedy. Moreover,

they feel quite at ease judging and dismissing it. Although there was a weak inverse correlation

between education and knowledge of lowbrow comedy and education, there was a much stronger

inverse correlation between appreciation of lowbrow comedy and education. With an accessible and

popular medium such as television, this knowledge of television shows seems to be more logical than

lack of knowledge. Still, from the above, it is clear that television is not as accessible as it seems, so it

is interesting to see how higher educated people get this knowledge, and what this knowledge entails.

Their dislike of lowbrow comedy seems typical of a taste hierarchy: and using the interviews with the

lover of highbrow taste, I will explore the mechanisms behind this dislike. There are considerably

fewer interviews than with aficionados of lowbrow comedy: 15 higher educated interviewees, and one

college dropout, of the sample of 32 average Dutch can be said to have highbrow taste in comedy.

On this side of the taste hierarchy, the question is not: why don‘t they know things, but why do

the know? Or rather: what do they know? What cultural knowledge do they need and employ to see

things and reject it? What is the knowledge behind dislike and disdain? Let me start again with one

16

specific example of the humor in this style. In the first stage of this study, I recruited informants at a

joke-telling contest called Moppentoppers (the name is a contamination of ‘topper’, which means the

same in English, and moppentapper, a popular term for joke-teller). This program was aired by

commercial channel RTL4, which has a predominantly lower educated audience. Very soon I

discovered that this name did not mean much to people in my immediate social surroundings – mostly

university educated. However, after some explanation, people would usually say that they had ‘seen it

in passing’ on TV. Interestingly, most of them then continued to explain that seeing that this show was

presented by someone name Ron Brandsteder, they immediately switched to another channel.

The same pattern was visible in the interviews with the lovers of highbrow humor:

What about Moppentoppers? Husband: No, that is horrible. Yes, I really think so. That’s this Brandsteder character, I think that has something to do with it. Wife: What is this Moppentoppers? Does he do that? Husband: Yes, and I watched it once or twice. Don’t you remember? It is a joke telling contest. Wife: Yes, now I remember. Yes, that is horrible. (to husband): I noticed you rated it (meaning the show) ‘one’ in the questionnaire. Husband: yes, this man is such a self-complacent prig. (Husband: college graduate-turned-carpenter,; wife, owner of antiques store) GK: Have you ever seen Moppentoppers? Is that with Ron Brandsteder? Once, I think. Well, that wasn’t very funny. You know what the problem is with things like this (and then he goes on to explain at length how telling jokes is never funny). (man, English teacher) Do you know moppentoppers Is that with those children? Is that is? Or is it.. I am not sure you know it. Maybe if you tell me. It’s with Ron Brandsteder. Right, it’s where they are on a stage and than they have to tell jokes. Well, I might have seen it, some of it, but it’s not really my thing. (man, doctor)

What these quotes show, first of all, the contrast between the uncertain tone and the lack of words

lower educated people had to denounce Ederveen, in contrast with the rather eloquent and very

decided way in which higher educated people expressed their dislike of Brandsteder. These informants

clearly felt they had the power to judge this man, and his show, after seeing it only once, or even less

than once.

Obviously, Ron Brandsteder, provoked an pronounced distaste; and this distaste immediately

affected people’s opinion of the shows he is doing, even if the don’t know anything about it.

Brandsteder clearly was an example of all that is bad about lowbrow humor; he was called ‘fake’ and

‘exaggerated’ many times, as well as ‘contrived, because he laughs about everything’ and ‘complete

rubbish. What can I say; it’s the accidental existence of cameras that made him famous, because he has

not talents at all. I think he himself is the only one who thinks he’s funny, must be…’ (man, lawyer).

People with lowbrow taste, on the other hand, usually liked Ron Brandsteder, who they felt was

17

charming, humorous, and good-natured, as well as Moppentoppers, which was called ‘real humor’,

and was many joke-tellers’ favorite show.

Also, these quotes show how the negative judgments of these people are entwined with their

previous knowledge of Ron Brandsteder, and they also show how they used this previous knowledge

to immediately discredit the show as a whole. This is how the knowledge, as well as the distaste, of

many higher educated people works. To a large extent, it is ‘working knowledge’: one recognizes

people, or genres, and on the basis of this on dares to claim that it is not interesting.

During my interviews, I discovered there is usually not much knowledge, nor interest, behind

their dismissal. This goes even for the most popular comedian in this cluster, Andre van Duin. All my

informants knew he was doing a show at the time of the interviews, but higher educated informants

weren’t quite sure what he was up to. When asked what they did not like about him, they usually

referred to things that he did ten or twenty years ago. There are many examples of this: they knew (and

disliked) the principle of the candid camera, and gave low ratings to the one show based on this genre

(a show that had been on for a very long time), but they had no idea whether it was still on, and hadn’t

seen a candid camera show for years. Similarly, they were very confident in claming they disliked the

sitcom called Flodder, but usually they had only seen the film on which it was based. In other words:

much of the negative judgments of higher educated people was based on superficial and outdated

knowledge. This knowledge was, however, felt to suffice for finding good shows on TV; and also for

filling out my questionnaire. When asking further question, people usually could not name any

concrete examples, or described what these persons had been doing in the past ten years.

Unlike the lower educated respondents, higher educated informants never saw nothing. On the

contrary: many of their judgments were very outspoken. Without hesitation, things were described as

corny and vulgar; and people weren’t above using expletives to express their disgust. An 82-year old

female lawyer said about comedian Sylvia Millecam, with a strong look of disgust on her face: ‘Yugh!

That’s such terrible affectation!’ Others were described as ‘teeeeeeeeribly coarse’, or ‘really much to

facile’. This, then, is truly, a rejecting reading, as Morley (1980) described it: they did decode it, then

completely rejected it. And I do think they did derive some gratification from this decoding, but no

humorous gratification. But what they probably did think they got from this, is status.

What does this tell us about the knowledge behind dislike and dismissal? First of all, that

higher educated informants, even if they said they never watched television, had superficial, but

usually rather complete knowledge of what happened on television. Apparently, the channel switching

during commercial breaks was enough to develop this working knowledge, which shows that this

knowledge is embedded in a much more general ‘television knowledge’: of genres, names, faces. This

working knowledge may be applied to shows, persons, as well as genres. Moreover, these people have

great security about their own judgment: they are quite sure that theirs is the legitimate taste. What

they have is the power to judge. This power is based on a more general knowledge, which enables

them to interpret even the kinds of comedy they don’t like, and to denounce or applaud it with great

18

certainty. To be sure, lower educated informants did show certainty in their denouncements of

comedy, and they also described certain comedians in a rather crass ways. But the scope of this

knowledge was simple smaller. Hierarchy gives them plenty of power, and just enough knowledge.

However, with this power comes an obligation: the higher educated usually felt they

had to have an opinion. This may be caused, in part, by the fact that I was a member of their group.

But the notion that they had the legitimate taste did seem to give them the feeling that they had to

show this knowledge, even if is was very superficial, and that they had to recognize names and shows.

On several occasions, my middle class informants claimed to know someone and then went on to

describe someone else – which never happened with lower educated informants. They were less afraid

to ask. Higher educated informants seemed more reluctant to show such taste insecurity. In these

interviews, I was usually very conscious of the performative aspects of taste. Taste always is a

performance, something to show you are part of a specific group (Hennion 2000). This ‘performance

of taste’ is usually described as an obnoxious problem for researchers: social desirability. However,

research problems can often also be described as part of the research findings. In this case: the social

desirability of taste performance and competence showed something about highbrow taste culture. Of

course, lower educated also performed their tastes. But they did seems less bothered by the notion of

legitimacy (in any case, if there was such a thing, I had a hard time discovering it). With the people at

the upper end of the taste hierarchy, taste always is a performance of their competence, and their social

worth. Thus, the power to judge comes with the obligation to perform.

Conclusion

How are hierarchical relationships between taste cultures possible in a fragmented, popular, and

accessible medium like television? At least in the case of Dutch television comedy, television has not

led to homogenization, nor to democratization, nor to fragmentation of taste. Instead, preferences for

television comedy were found to be based in taste cultures related to simple social background

variables: age and taste. The relationships between these taste cultures did not resemble the any of the

more ‘postmodern’ models of taste cultures as fragmented, life-style based or omnivorous. Instead, the

age difference was related to a distinction between the mainstream versus a marginal taste, with

interestingly, younger people being the mainstream, and old-fashioned humor being the subcultural or

marginal taste. The other taste cultures resulting from the analysis were highbrow versus lowbrow

cultures, these were related to educational background.

The existence of a taste hierarchy within television is unexpected for three reasons: television

is very accessible, fragmented, and almost exclusively devoted to popular culture. Of course, comedy

is always popular culture. From the statistical analysis, as well as the interviews, it has become clear

that popular culture, such as comedy, is a very stratified domain. This has been described for other

television and domains as well: although genres are often reified as ‘high’ or ‘low’, genres such as

news, drama, and crime have middlebrow, higher popular, lowbrow popular, and even more mixed

19

varieties (Creeber, 2000). The highbrow comedy preferred by higher educated informants is a mixture

of the highbrow ‘logic’ of the esthetic disposition with popular techniques and a popular aim:

amusement. The development of such mixed high-low styles could be described as one of the

contributions of television to modern society: the emancipation of popular culture, the upward

mobility of popular genres, and the increasing respectability of entertainment. However, such a

development of popular highbrow and popular lowbrow could also be more typical of comedy than of

other genres: humor tends to be a strong marker of social class, and also very strongly linked to

identity and the drawing of social boundaries. The hypothesis that this rather pronounced taste

hierarchy is domain-specific cannot be ruled out completely; and it would be interesting to compare

the pattern found here with genres such as drama, crime, action or game shows.

The second reason why taste hierarchies seem incompatible with television is because TV is

such a fragmented medium. However, from the data presented here, it seems reasonable to assume that

audiences, at least in the Netherlands, are not as fragmented as television scholars have suggested or

predicted. The reason for this is that the taste cultures found here are directly linked to social

categories that are very strongly embedded in social life and social networks. This is probably one of

the reasons why gender was not correlated with separate taste cultures: men and women may have

some different preferences (and these were found in the interviews), but they often share lives,

households, and television sets, so their preferences might not develop into true ‘cultures’. People of

different ages and educational backgrounds generally lead more separate lives. This is especially

important because of the strong continuity between television comedy and everyday life: in the larger

study of which this article is a part, television taste was shown to be an integral part of people’s

general taste: they employed the same criteria to judge television comedy and humor in everyday life.

Moreover, these variables have exceptionally strong ‘sociological backing’: the educational

difference is linked what is probably the most pervasive institution in modern society, the educational

system, which is constantly reproduced in work, neighborhoods, etc. The age difference is also

influenced by something quite pervasive: the age in which you grow up and get socialized. It would be

hard to conceptualize tastes that are not influenced by such things. However, it is possible that a more

thorough study will show a number of different taste cultures within these ‘basic’ taste cultures based

on ‘hard’ social background factors. For instance, on the basis of Bourdieu’s theory, there should be a

more conservative highbrow taste: these could be the people in figure 2 who know but don’t like

highbrow humor. A number of multidimensional analyses were run to look for such ‘varieties’ within

taste cultures, but a larger study with more subjects, and especially: more items might be needed to

look for such patterns of ‘layered’ taste cultures within the highbrow/lowbrow and

mainstream/marginal patterns.

Thirdly, the existence of a taste hierarchy in television is unexpected because television is such

an accessible medium: with television, the same programs enter undisturbed into everybody’s living

room, bedroom, kitchen, etc. None of the usual barriers to highbrow culture, financial, as well as

20

cultural (knowing how to behave, how to blend in) are present in television. Also, highbrow television

is not labeled ‘highbrow’ in the same kind of way: television is mostly out of reach to the gatekeepers

of high culture, such as teachers, critics, and increasingly: parents. However, what this study shows is

that highbrow tastes still have plenty of barriers left. Television actually seems to be very fit for

producing shows and programs that mean very little to many of its audiences. This specific form of

popular culture is not ‘open to many interpretations or readings. Although it is popular culture, it has

the exclusivity and habitus of highbrow culture.

The enjoyment of television comedy, of any kind, actually requires a lot of knowledge: the

knowledge to decode it comedy, to see something in it and to recognize it as humor, and then to enjoy

it. A large part of this cultural knowledge of television is common to all taste cultures: everybody

employs the knowledge to recognize style, genre, tone, character, to judge the dominant medium of

our time. Really is undistinguishable from this form of knowledge: any preference, as well as dislike

and disgust, is embedded in such forms of knowledge to the extent that taste really is a form of cultural

knowledge. However, different groups not only have different kinds of knowledge, some knowledge

seems to have wider reach than others, and some people simply have more knowledge.

Moreover, this knowledge seems to be a very specific kind of knowledge – much more so than

television scholars have assumed. Alternatives to the preferred readings usually did not result in very

gratifying humorous experiences. Only a very small number of comedians and shows appeared to be

open to readings that were truly different from the preferred readings, and from these, only one was in

the highbrow cluster, none in the lowbrow (see Kuipers 2001) Generally, for the comedy discussed

here neatly fit in with Sonia Livingstone’s summary of television fare: ‘heavily overcoded, closed and

repetitive’. And not at all accomodating to the active audience.

To be sure, all television viewers employ enormous amounts of cultural knowledge.

Aficionados of lowbrow humor also have their cultural capital, their knowledge and skill to see

something that others do not see. The difference is that, in some cases, people see nothing, in other

cases, people see something they might disapprove of: something crude, easy, or vulgar – or maybe

they will just think it is boring. t is not inaccessible in the same way: it could conjure up disgust,

boredom, irritation, but never the non-understanding disinterest that can hardly be captured in words.

As one of the joke-tellers, a lower educated mechanic remarked, quite to the point:

`Andre van Duin (the best-liked lowbrow comedian), everybody can listen to him, one might find it corny, they other might crack up over it, but it is accessible to everyone.’

In the case of Van Duin, everybody will see something that he feels legitimate in having an opinion

about, and about whom he feels justified to have this option: for highbrow comedians like Ederveen

this is much less likely. This is (part of) the profit of a high education: there is more to reject, more to

look down upon.

21

But is the inverse also true? Do lower educated people look up to highbrow taste? The

highbrow comedy described here was most certainly an exclusive taste, but was it the ‘legitimate

taste’? Clearly, it was so in the eyes of my higher educated informants; this was quite certain from the

security in their ‘performance of taste’. However, although the lower educated interviewees were

rather puzzled or despondent about highbrow culture, they never seemed to have the feeling there was

something truly wrong about that, and they were quite content, and definitely not ashamed about their

own tastes. In other words, there had no ‘upward aspirations’ – which are the basis of all trickle down

models of culture. Possibly, this is related to the fact that we were talking about humor, one of the few

domains in which ‘the people’ usually believe they have more feeling for than ‘uptight’ intellectuals.

However, it seems to be that lower educated people in the Netherlands are increasingly secure about

their tastes, and that the legitimacy of high culture as well as high knowledge is steadily decreasing

(see also Van Eijck e.a. 2002). After all, it is all on the same television, so why would it be worth

more? What television might do to highbrow tastes, then, is to transform them from legitimate tastes to

exclusive subcultures. And this may be the mechanism through which television may be a threat to

highbrow-lowbrow models of taste culture: not through the removal of barriers to high culture, or the

loss of exclusivity; but through the loss of legitimacy.

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